Noli Irritare Leones

Many years ago, I was at a Quaker meeting where Joan Baez was moved to speak. It’s been decades, so my memory of what she said is a bit fuzzy, but as I recall she began with a humorous story about a small bird, trying to hold up the sky, moved from that to an account of her conversion to radical nonviolence (with an analogy that involved the small bird organizing a whole flock of birds), and concluded with a description of a fallen Christmas ornament of a bird.

The story was much funnier, as Joan told it, than I can remember to tell, and by the end we were all laughing, and every time the laughter started to die, one old woman would burst out with such a distinctive laugh that she’d get everyone going again. But I’m remembering it now for the part about radical nonviolence. Though the image of birds holding up the sky was silly, Joan was, of course, quite serious about the radical nonviolence. She had been converted, she said, and as I recall it was when she was a teenager, from pacifism to radical nonviolence, a much more active and engaged form of peacemaking.

William Penn described the early Quaker movement as “Primitive Christianity Revived,” but is it possible to revive primitive Christianity? There’s a saying that you can never step in the same river twice; when you return, it’s not the same river, and you are also not the same person. And there’s a sense in which even attempts to revive and restore primitive Christianity become ways of seeing it fresh, in a new time and place. The Quaker Peace Testimony, like the similar beliefs of Mennonites and Brethren, is a revival of an earlier, pre-Constantinian, Christian position on war (and oaths), but peace church traditions also evolve and get recast over time. In fact, there isn’t a single war-justifying Christian tradition opposing a single pacifist Christian position, and, if you read, for example, the writings of John Yoder, you can see where he teases apart varying positions on war: the just war tradition that aims to both accept and limit war, the blank check position that’s the easy default if we don’t think too closely, the Holy War position, and the whole variety of different pacifisms that he presents in Nevertheless, from early Christian concerns about idolatry to modern concerns about nuclear weapons. Our world, the one in which we vote on the government that runs the most powerful military in the world, is different from the world of early Christianity, in which the most powerful military in their known world was largely an occupying force not answerable to them. And our various pacifisms have headed in different directions, from the separatist pacifism of the Amish to the social engagement of radical nonviolence.

Would the early Christians recognize radical nonviolence? Maybe not. Yoder describes early Christian pacifism as difference, in some ways more like that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, with a rejection of bloodshed that might well resonate with modern pacifists mingled with a rejection of idolatry that modern Christian pacifism has to a large degree forgotten. On the other hand, there’s Walter Wink’s interpretation of the “turn the other cheek” passage, which argues that it is in fact describing a form of active resistance.

Neither of the invidious alternatives of flight or fight is what Jesus is proposing. Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil. His is a third alternative not even touched by these options. The Scholars Version translates Antistenai brilliantly: “Don’t react violently against someone who is evil.”

Jesus clarifies his meaning by three brief examples. “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Why the right cheek? How does one strike another on the right cheek anyway? Try it. A blow by the right fist in that right-handed world would land on the left cheek of the opponent. To strike the right cheek with the fist would require using the left hand, but in that society the left hand was used only for unclean tasks. As the Dead Sea Scrolls specify, even to gesture with the left hand at Qumran carried the penalty of ten days penance. The only way one could strike the right cheek with the right hand would be with the back of the hand.

…

Why then does Jesus counsel these already humiliated people to turn the other cheek? Because this action robs the
oppressor of power to humiliate them. The person who turns the other cheek is saying, in effect, “Try again. Your first blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate me. I am a human being just like you. Your status (gender, race, age, wealth) does not alter that. You cannot demean me.” Such a response would create enormous difficulties for the striker. Purely logistically, how can he now hit the other cheek? He cannot backhand it with his right hand. If he hits with a fist, he makes himself an equal, acknowledging the other as a peer. But the whole point of the back of the hand is to reinforce the caste system and its institutionalized inequality.

I’m not sure, reading Wink, whether he’s discovering a kind of active resistance in Jesus’ examples that had been missed, or whether he’s reading into the Sermon on the Mount a modern sensibility of the political use of nonviolence that just wouldn’t have been heard in that time and place. I don’t think I know enough about that ancient culture to say one way or the other. But I am sure that such active nonviolent resistance is, at least, within the range of ways we can recast the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount in new times and places, and not a reversal of the meaning.

Can war and killing actually fairly be described so, as Christian evolution in response to political power, rather than as Christian abandonment of principle?

Constantine’s been unfairly blamed for many changes in Christianity over time. Protestants who dislike Catholic ritual and hierarchy want to think that it all started with Constantine. Liberal followers of Jesus who aren’t so convinced he’s God want to point to Constantine and the Council of Nicaea as where it all went wrong. But the Church had long since evolved a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons and sacraments including some sort of belief in Real Presence long before Constantine, and Jesus had been worshipped from very early on (though the Council of Nicaea judged between two different ways in which Jesus might be related to God, it was hardly the origin of seeing Jesus as divine). The Roman emperors, in fact, didn’t, in the end, care so much about whether the Arian or Athanasian view of Trinity won out (at times they favored the Arian view), as that the Church stayed politically united with one view or the other.

But one area where there was a sea change in Christian thinking, at the time of Constantine, was in matters of war and peace. Even here, we’re looking at a shift over time rather than a once for all shift when Constantine converted.

The fourth century brought with it what Yoder calls a ‘creeping empire loyalty’. Christians still refused to participate in violence and war, the swearing of oaths, etc, “but the church was moving in that direction.” (50) A key part, in my view, is that Yoder notes the early Church’s acceptance of the national boundaries of the Roman Empire as the ‘borders of the world’. Prior to this, the Church saw the entire known world as part of its mission field; yet with increasing loyalty to Rome, the early Church began to associate the borders of its mission field and its identity with the Roman borders. Yoder notes that a lot of this change in perspective connects with the increasing numbers of Christians that operated in the upper echelons of Roman culture and politics….

So, was Christian acceptance of war actually an evolution, a natural adaption of doctrine to new circumstances, as those running a government can’t be held to the same standards on use of force as individuals? Or was it an abandonment of Christ’s teaching, in favor of practices that can’t possibly be reconciled with the words of the man who called on us to turn the other cheek, go the second mile, love our enemies, and not react violently even to those who are evil?

Part of the argument for Christian acceptance of war has been the development of a just, or as Yoder would call it justifiable, war tradition, in which war was supposed to be accepted only with certain limits. These limits applied both to the occasions when going to war could be justified (jus ad bellum) and to the means that could be properly used during war (jus in bello). The Geneva Conventions are an example of “jus in bello.”

Now, I am a Quaker, and therefore placed in the pacifist, not the just war tradition. But I’m going to argue, to those Christians who defend the just war tradition, that, in order for it to be a credible position, its limits have to be taken seriously. If, in practice, we always defer to whatever the current President says is necessary for national security, and accept any war whatsoever that is proposed, and if, in practice, we argue that any means whatsoever that our leaders have approved is always to be defended as necessary, be it preemptive war, or torture, what we’re defending isn’t any sort of traditional rules of just war, but rather a blank check for the state. Or at least an almost blank check, where the only check in practice is the traditional “Reasonable Hope for Success” test, and that test gets applied only after we’ve gotten into the war and realized we aren’t winning.

On taking the “just war” tradition seriously, from an Episcopalian who follows that tradition:

Rightly understood, however — and rightly practiced — the Christian just-war tradition isn’t the opposite of pacifism; it can serve as an important complement. As Yoder points out, the judgment that presumably “good” warfare has failed to achieve its own stated goal, i.e., securing peace, is not reached on the basis of pacifism (which rejects warfare on principle); it is an observation based on the constraints of the just war tradition itself (When War Is Unjust, pp. 71-80).

Yoder’s challenge to “just-war” advocates to be “morally serious” requires them to be prepared to oppose a specific war, or an act of warfare, as unjust. For the church’s deliberation on warfare to be realistic — for the tradition to be even minimally credible — it must take place in a context where those who advocate war must present all the relevant information regarding the cause for war; the full range of alternatives; and evidence — not just presidential assertion — that those alternatives have been exhausted. A war’s advocates must frankly discuss the possible costs, most important among them the real risks to innocent human lives (not primarily the risk to “our troops”!), and a realistic appraisal of all the possible consequences of the projected war.

The fact that those baseline criteria aren’t even on our national radar screen does not mean the just-war tradition is
“obsolete.” It means the conditions for justifying any recent war in terms that would satisfy Christian teaching have not been met. And that means that in most recent conflicts, the strict application of the Christian just-war tradition would have set “just-war” proponents shoulder to shoulder with pacifists in opposing the war du jour.

For Quakers, the questions are a little different. As I’ve watched my country, since 9/11, head into a preemptive war
that I could see wasn’t likely to do the good things its advocates predicted (in addition to the war I knew to expect the moment the planes hit), and lose its moral compass about torture, I’ve felt as if I’m trying to get us to recover even a sense of those limitations that are part of the just war tradition, such as the value of the Geneva Conventions. But I myself am part of a faith that calls me to a more rigorous rejection of war. Have I compromised too much? Have I resisted too little? Do I, too, have a share in the fault for Abu Ghraib? And what does it really mean to “live in the life and power that take away the occasion of war”?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under Peace Testimony. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.